The evolution of mankind on the earth, I should say, the evolution of intelligent life in this universe depicted by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin provides us with a clear vision of what would come and what we should do to make it happen.Teilhard has shared this version in his masterpiece "The human phenomenon" with a scientific and yet poetic language, while integrating the progress of his time. But the access to this major work is not easy, requiring patience and perseverance. "The place of human in the nature" is a condensed "but clearer" version of this important book, according to Teilhard himself.[1] It could be considered as a stepping stone to enter Teilhard's world.

Why is it important to promote Teilhard de Chardin in China?

China has been achieving the huge and astonishing progress in each important domain for more than 30 years. There is no doubt that China will become a superpower of the 21st century, reshaping the entire world to come. Its uprising will be one of the major events of human history. All along the desire for the modernization and a better life, people feel at the same time and even more deeply a hunger for meaning, the meaning of life, the meaning of human efforts, the meaning of a higher moral standard, etc. In short, people are looking for the answers to the following questions: why are we here? Where do we go? In which direction and why?

Teilhard's thoughts provide us with his answers, inviting us to an extraordinary journey of exploration.

Could you recount for us the history of your career?

When I was a 13 year old boy, I asked myself a simple question: "What's the value and the meaning of human life?" Since then, all my life has been oriented to the search for this meaning.

Then in 1978, I felt the urge to leave the factory to resume my studies at the university after "the Cultural revolution". In 1983, I left my home land, flew to France, in order to "learn" with all the philosophers and thinkers I could find. There I obtained a PhD in philosophy and a second one in engineering.

But I remained unsatisfied until I encounter Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. For me, his thought is like a candle in the darkness of night.

I have been working for more than 25 years for the France Telecom Orange Group. After taking different positions in various divisions such as HR, Business development, Sales, R&D and procurement, I currently work as CEO of Orange Sourcing Consulting. I am very much involved in promoting Teilhard's thinking and also in the implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility principles, understood as part of efforts in the direction of ongoing human evolution pointed by Teilhard.

Teilhard de Chardin wrote The Phenomenon of Man (Le Phénomène humain) over a period of time that coincided with his entire stay in China, from 1922-1946, during which time he often left China to visit Europe, other countries in Asia and the US. This book, still considered as his magnum opus, tells the great story of the "human phenomenon" advent through the continuity of the formation of matter and the debut of life on earth, while being at the same time a reflexion on what will become of the "human phenomenon."

The book was published posthumously in 1955.

This excerpt of the documentary Teilhard and China introduces an original typed copy of the book conserved at the Beijing Center and gives us the testimony of a Chinese reader.

In the following video taken from the unused footage of the documentary 'Teilhard and China', Thierry Meynard, SJ, director of the Beijing Center, discusses the theory of evolution according to Teilhard de Chardin and its significance for the World today.

The 'Teilhard adventure' started for me at the beginning of the year 2013 after reading the 'libretto', written in French by Benoit Vermander. Very dense and documented, the 20 pages were my first immersion into Teilhard de Chardin's world. I appreciated Benoit Vermander's pedagogical approach: in his usual concise style, he resumed a lifelong story while giving prominence to the texts and the voice of Teilhard. Thus I discovered the intense text of the Mass on the World and even had the chance to re-read a French school classic: an excerpt from 17th century philosopher Pascal.

But my challenge was to make a film of this 20 pages-long literary piece.

While working on the pre-production phase of the movie, we came across another team preparing a bigger scale documentary for US television: Frank and Mary Frost from Frank Frost Productions. Frank and Benoit had met during a colloquium on Teilhard in 2012 and they had kept in touch since then. Frank and Mary had planned a research site trip to China and they were very kind to invite us to join them.

In May 2013, I embarked on a trip to Beijing and Ningxia with Taiwanese filming assistant, Sharon Liu. Thanks to Frank and Mary's contacts, we met for example Hailu You, a paleontologist from the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of China (IVPP) who appears in the movie.

The following video is an interview with Frank at the end of our trip:

In the meantime, Benoit Vermander was planning an intercultural workshop organized by Fudan University with the support of the Taipei Ricci Institute. The workshop, held in Inner Mongolia, would invite scholars and writers, mostly from Shanghai and Taipei, to read and discuss excerpts from Teilhard's work. The logistical preparation of the workshop was undertaken by Liang Zhun, a photographer based in Shanghai and a long-term collaborator of Benoit Vermander. She notably contributed to the film the beautiful shots of the desert and the Salawusu Valley.

The workshop was also quite an interesting experience: our heteroclit group got immersed in the immensity of the landscapes that Teilhard had crossed nearly a century ago. One of the most dramatic moments was probably when a small group of us went at dawn to the plateau bordering the desert of Ordos to listen to Yaling Wu, a lecturer at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, read in Chinese the Mass on the World at the same spot Teilhard celebrated it.

After my trip to China, I joined Benoit Vermander in the region of Auvergne, Teilhard's birthplace in France, where we were very generously welcomed by his closest living relatives: his nephew Henri du Passage and daughter Marie Bayon de La Tour who inherited Teilhard's passion for geology. As we accompanied her to the banks of the river Allier where he used to take his nephews to show them rocks, one could even more vividly feel Teilhard's deep understanding of nature and Marie Bayon de la Tour, interviewed in the film, also emphasized this aspect: "Auvergne can only be understood if we imagine that it is alive, and that its geology evolves with time. I think it influenced Father Teilhard."

Once back in Taipei, I undertook the task of editing and finalizing the production of the movie, and finally the French version of the documentary premiered in Paris in June 2014 at the Centre Sèvres. The Chinese version was screened during the colloquium "Teilhard and the Future of Humankind" held in Beijing in October 2014. (Lien vers article BV) A year later the release of the DVD in its three versions, French, English and simplified Chinese would coincide with the anniversary of Teilhard's death.

Like any other project and human experience, this film in its three versions is the result of lucky encounters and fruitful collaborative work with all the difficulties and obstacles that it implies. I hope that this attempt of introducing Teilhard de Chardin to the Chinese audience, and to a broader public in general, can be the start of more dialogue, discussion and understanding between the people of different horizons.

The movie starts in a hospital: white ceiling, white gloves, the sound of a heartbeat reproduced by the echography machine, a robotic sound that will stop as we see a doctor or a nurse take what seems to be surgical instruments of abortion. Then a fade out opens on to a dusty road, two little boys play at the foreground. A close-up lets us guess that they are twins.

This 20 minute movie is about the simple and happy life of these two little boys who basically spend their time playing in the garden, eating, watching TV and sleeping. The scenes are filmed at their eye-level, thus adopting their point of view and making us enter their world where adults are scarcely present: their mother, pregnant, who bathes and dresses them, their grandparents and their father who appears only once as he comes home.

So the space of representation in the movie just varies between the house and the garden in a continuous coming and going (va-et-vient). But another reality pierces through the opening created by the screen of the TV: the uninterrupted broadcast of images of war and violence contrasts with the serene sequences that depict the games and the activities of the family. As the camera lingers on the eyes of the little boys mesmerized by the TV, one of them suddenly lowers his look as though sadness has invaded him. That scene preludes the only fight scene between the twins (inside the house) which is followed by a long shot of the deserted garden where a toy gun remains.

The movie impresses by its scarcity of information: we only know that it takes place in Kyrgyzstan because of this strange sentence which opens the movie both in Russian and English: “Kyrgyzstan is a country of short films!” But we don’t know which village or town or city; also none of the people are named, there isn’t either any time indication. In fact, the movie is almost mute, only punctuated by the chirping of the boys. And this is what precisely gives to the movie its universal meaning and its interest. What we are told here is not the story of a particular family but the story of humanity through its particularism, with a certain Rousseauistic perspective: the innocent happiness of humans in nature disturbed by the corruption of a violent outside world that will maybe see these boys grow old to be soldiers; the opposition between childhood and adult age, the close tangle of life and death. But the movie is not pessimistic as it finishes on a note of hope with the birth of the twins’ little sister: the circle closes finally on life.

In June and July 2013, the Fijian navigator Setareki Ledua and the Samoan dancer Tupe Lualua toured Taiwan for a cultural workshop designed to enhance the exchanges and links between Taiwan Austronesians and other cultures from the Pacific. Here are some videos filmed, compiled and edited by members of our team and participants in the workshop.